The 2×4
The 2×4
I took a Freshman Seminar in my first semester at Princeton in 1988 with a world-renowned professor of classical literature, Bob Hollander. My good friend and next-door neighbor Peggy was in the seminar with me. It was a small group — maybe a dozen of us — meeting for three hours each week for a roundtable with Professor Hollander, and then writing the occasional paper. Peggy and I both thought we were pretty smart. We had both been high school salutatorians from good private schools and had both gotten into Princeton, right?
Then the first paper came due, and we were both a bit cavalier about it. We wrote them in full and delivered them on time, but we probably could have taken the exercise more seriously and upped our game. This became evident when we got our grades back. One of us got a C-, and the other got either a D or an F. I can’t remember exactly, and I can’t remember which was which. All I remember is that we were both stunned and furious. So we dropped by to see Professor Hollander during his office hours, and he said the same thing to each of us: “Matt, sometimes you need a 2×4 between the eyes. This paper is adequate, but I can tell it’s not your best work, it’s decent for high school but not for college, and almost all the others in the class were much more thoughtful.”
Ouch.
Ever since then, Peggy and I have talked about the 2×4, and how it helped us snap out of our own reality and into a new one with a significantly higher bar for quality. That phrase made it into Return Path‘s lexicon years ago, and it means an equivalent thing — sometimes we have to have hard conversations with employees about performance issues. The hardest ones are with people who think they are doing really well, when in reality they’re failing or in danger of failing. That disconnect requires a big wakeup call — the 2×4 between the eyes — before things spiral into a performance plan or a termination.
Delivering a 2×4 between the eyes to an employee can feel horrible. But it’s the best gift you can give that employee if you want to shake them back onto a successful trajectory.
Sweet Sixteen (Sixteen Candles?)
Today marks Return Path’s 16th anniversary. I am incredibly proud of so many things we have accomplished here and am brimming with optimism about the road ahead. While we are still a bit of an awkward teenager as a company continuing to scale, 16 is much less of an awkward teen year than 13, both metaphorically and actually. Hey – we are going to head off for college in two short years!
In honor of 16 Candles, one of my favorite movies that came out when I was a teenager, IÂ thought I’d mark this occasion by drawing the more obvious comparisons between us and some of the main characters from the movie. Â My apologies to those who may have missed this movie along the way.
Why we are like Samantha (Molly Ringwald): Â No, no one borrowed our underpants. But we can’t believe that people forgot our birthday either.
Why we are like Farmer Ted / The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall): Â Meet my co-founder, George Bilbrey. I mean that with love.
Why we are like Jake (Michael Schoeffling): Â Meet my other co-founder, Jack Sinclair. The shy, good looking one.
Why we are like Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe): Â We have only been in our newest business, Consumer Insight, for five minutes, but we already have a whole bunch of dates.
Why we are like Grandpa Fred (Max Showalter): Â We’ve been around long enough to know the ways of the world, not to mention all the good wisecracks in the book.
There you have it. Year 17, here we come!
35 at 15
This was a big week for Return Path. Â First we announced a $35mm financing led by an exceptional private equity firm that I’d never heard of before the middle of the fundraising process a few months ago. Â We are happy to have them join our very strong board and syndicate and even happier to have additional investment capital to accelerate our growth, especially in newer businesses for us like Email Fraud Protection and our overall data and analytic capabilities.
But in some ways even more important, or at least more sentimentally important news this week is that tomorrow, December 6, marks the 15th anniversary of Return Path’s founding.  A decade and a half with probably over 800 employees in total over time in a dozen locations and several thousand clients worldwide.  We’ve “served” over 30 million consumers, including some of our legacy businesses like ECOA, Postmaster Direct, and Authentic Response, as well as our current panel.  Preparing for our annual year-end all-hands meetings over the next couple weeks was a fun exercise this week in pulling up, diving into lessons learned from this past year (and more), and trying to crisply articulate our vision for the next few years.
The next leg of our journey is going to be interesting and quite different from the past in many ways, though of course some things, like our values and spirit, won’t change.  Lots of aspects of our jobs will.  But that’s a good thing.  I’m not sure I could have ever done the same job for 15 years, and even though my title and company haven’t changed since 1999, the substance of my job has changed every few years.  I have loved every minute of every day of this journey (even the not-so-good ones) and am privileged to work with such an amazingly talented executive team, staff, and board.  I won’t say “here’s to the next 15,” because I can’t count that high, but here’s to Return Path!
And to celebrate #15, my colleague Tom Sather assembled this fun infographic that has some fun stats and is a bit of walk through history.
Book Short: Internet Fiction, part II
Book Short:Â Internet Fiction, part II
I hate to write a lame post, but here’s what I wrote earlier in the year about Eliot Peper’s first Internet thriller, Uncommon Stock:
Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.
Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending. I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.
Having just finished that second installment, called Uncommon Stock: Power Play, basically I want to say “ditto.” Â Power Play was just as good as the first book, and now I can’t wait for the third. Where the first installment’s startup focus was around funding and founder dynamics, this one’s startup focus was around shipping product and customers. The thriller part was just as juicy.
It’s also kind of fun reading about the Boulder startup scene, especially from a writer who doesn’t and who has never spent a ton of time there. He gets some things remarkably accurate with crisp descriptions. I was kind of hoping for a cameo by Brad, at least in the form of a throw-away comment about the “long haired homeless-looking investor in the corner of Frasca.”
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford  is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck.
The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning.
If your organization still does software development through a waterfall process or has separate and distinct development, QA, and IT/Operations teams, I’d say you should run, not walk, to get this book. But even if you are agile, lean, and practice continuous deployment, it’s still a good read as it provides reminders of what the world used to be like and what the manufacturing-rooted theories are behind these “new” techniques in software development.
I am so glad our technology team at Return Path, led by my colleagues Andy Sautins and David Sieh, had the wisdom to be early adopters of agile and lean processes, continuous deployment many years ago, and now dockers. Our DevOps process is pretty well grooved, and while I’m sure there are always things to be done to improve it…it’s almost never a source of panic or friction internally the way more traditional shops function (like the one in the book). I can’t imagine operating a business any other way.
Thanks to my long time friend and Board member Greg Sands of Costanoa Venture Capital for suggesting this excellent read.
The Joy of Coaching
I was the head coach of my two older kids’ little league team this past spring. The whole thing was a little bit of an accident – I vaguely volunteered for something and ended up in charge. The commitment was a little daunting, but I was ok with it since the season was only a couple months long, it was both Casey and Wilson, and both kids, especially Wilson, are really into baseball. Other than helping out a bit here and there, I’d never coached a sports team before.
What started off as an unclear assignment ended up as one of the most fun and fulfilling things I’ve done in years. I loved every minute of it, looked forward to our practices and games, was hugely bummed out when we got rained out, and never had a moment where I couldn’t make the time for it (though clearly the hours had to come from somewhere!). Given some of the overlap between leading a sports team and leading a company, I thought I’d reflect on the experience a bit here. There are some common themes between this post and something I wrote years ago, Parenting and Corporate Leadership, with the same caveat that no, I don’t think employees are children or children are employees. But here are some things I take away from the experience and apply or compare to work.
We established a clear philosophy and stuck to it. That’s a step that lots of coaches – and managers in the workplace – miss. The other coaches and I discussed this before the first practice, agreed on it, and shared it directly with the kids. For this age group in particular, we felt that we were there first and foremost to have fun; second to learn the game; and third, to play hard and fair. Note there was nothing in this about winning, and that we were really specific about the order of the three objectives. Even 7 and 8 year olds know the difference between “win at all costs” and “have fun and play ball.” We reinforced this at every practice and at every game. Being intentional about a philosophy and communicating it (and of course sticking to it) are key for any leadership situation.
We got lucky. As I repeatedly said to the parents on the team, we had a group of awesome kids – happy and generally paying attention, and not one troublemaker in the bunch; and we had a group of awesome parents – responsive, supportive, and not a single complaint about what position a kid was playing or where someone was in the batting order. I’d heard horror stories about both kids and parents from other coaches ahead of time. It’s possible that the other coaches and I did such a good job that both kids and parents were great all the time…but I think you have to chalk most of that up to the luck of the draw. Work isn’t all that different. Having stakeholders who are consistently positive forces is something that sometimes you can shape (you can fire problematic employees) but often you can’t, in the case of customers or even Board members. Luck matters.
Stakeholder alignment was a critical success factor. Having said that, I do think the coaches and I did a good job of keeping our stakeholders aligned and focusing on their needs, not ours. We put extra effort into a regular cadence of communication with the parents in the form of weekly emails and a current web site. We used those emails to highlight kids’ performance and also let parents know what we’d be working on in practice that week. We made sure that we rotated kids in the batting order so that everyone got to bad leadoff once and cleanup once. We rotated kids so that almost every kid played half of each game in the infield and half in the outfield. We took any and all requests from kids who wanted to play a specific position for a few innings. Many of these basic principles – communicating well, a clear operating system, listening to stakeholders, a People First approach – are lessons learned from work as a CEO.
Proper expectations and a large dose of patience helped. After the first couple games, we were 0-2, and I was very frustrated. But I reminded myself that 7 and 8 year olds are just kids, and my frustration wasn’t going to help us achieve our objectives of having fun and learning the game. So I recalibrated my expectations and took much more of a laid-back attitude. For example, any time I saw one kid goofing off a little bit in practice, I gently got him or her back in line. But when I saw multiple kids’ attention fading, I took it as a sign that whatever I was doing as a coach wasn’t working, called a break, and did something else. This kind of “look in the mirror” approach is always helpful at work, too.
Reward and recognition were key.  We definitely adopted a Whale Done! approach with the kids.  We got the kids in the dugout fired up to cheer on batters.  First base coaches did big high fives, smiles, and literal pats on the back for every hit.  Post-game huddles and emails to parents focused on highlights and what went right for the kids.  One of my favorite moments of the season was when one player, who only had one hit all year and struck out almost every time at bat, had two hits, an RBI, and a run scored in our final game.  Not just the coaches, but the other kids and all the parents went absolutely BANANAS cheering for this player, and it brought huge smiles to all our faces.  I am 100% certain that the focus on the positive encouraged the kids to try their hardest all season, much as I believe that same philosophy encourages people to take risks and work hard at the office.
The biggest thing I take back to the workplace with me from the experience. I was reminded about how powerful achieving a state of “flow,” or “relaxed concentration” is. I recounted these principles in this blog post from a couple different books I’ve read over the years – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and Tim Gallway’s Inner Game books – Golf, Tennis, and Work. The gist of achieving a state of flow is to set clear goals that are stretch but achievable, become immersed in the activity, pay attention to what’s happening, and learn to enjoy immediate experience. All leaders – in sports, business, or any walk of life – can benefit from this way of living and leading.
I loved every minute of coaching. It helped that we ended up with a really strong record. But more than that, building relationships with a bunch of great kids and great parents was fun and fulfilling and incredibly thankful and rewarding. The “thank you ball” that all the kids autographed for me is now a cherished possession. Working and getting extra time with my own two kids was the icing on the cake. All I want to know is…is it time for next season yet? I am ready!
This post is really for Coaches Mike, Paul, and Oliver; and players Emily, Casey, Lauryn, Mike, Josh, Holden, Hudson, Wilson, Drew, Kevin, Matthew, and Christian.
A New Path Forward
A New Path Forward
Welcome to the world, Path Forward, Inc.!
I’m thrilled to announce the launch today of Path Forward, a new non-profit with a goal of empowering millions of women to rejoin the workforce after taking time out for childcare. We are launching today with a Crowdrise campaign.   See more about that below. And we launched with a bang, too – the organization is featured in this really amazing story on Fortune.
The concept started at Return Path two years ago, as I wrote about here and again here, when our CTO Andy Sautins came to me with a simple but powerful idea of creating a structured program of paid fellowships with training for women who want to reenter the workforce but find it difficult to do so because of rusty skills, lapsed networks, or societal bias. We expanded the program later that year with partner companies ReadyTalk, SendGrid, MWH Global, SpotX, and Moz, as I wrote about here. The response from both participants and companies has been nothing short of amazing.
The day after I put up that last post about v2 of the program, a human resources leader at PayPal gave me a call and asked if we could help them structure a program for their engineering organization, too.  That’s when it struck me that the idea of midcareer internships as one means of providing an on-ramp to the paid workforce for people who’d been focused on caregiving could work for many companies, and also that for this program to work and scale up, it couldn’t be an “off the side of the desk” project for the People Team at Return Path.  So we decided to create a new company separate from Return Path to carry out this important work. And we decided that with a practical, but social mission, it should be a non-profit, dedicated to creating and managing networks of companies offering opportunities to many more people.
To date, the program has served nearly 50 participants (mostly women, but a couple of stay-at-home dads, too!) and 7 companies in 6 cities around the world, producing an impressive 80% hire rate. The participants who have been hired by us and our partner organizations have made impressive contributions to their companies’ businesses and cultures. The companies have benefitted from their experience and passion. That’s what I call product-market fit. Now it’s time to officially launch the new organization, and scale it up! Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in the language of Jim Collins) is that within 10 years, we want to serve 10,000 companies and 1 million women and men. We want to reduce the penalty that caregivers face when they take time away from paid work. We want to transform lives by getting people who want to work, back to work in jobs that leverage all their many skills and talents. We want to help companies tap into an incredibly important but overlooked part of the talent pool to grow their workforces. We want to change the world.
We’ve been able to assemble a strong Board of Directors to lead this effort.  Joanne Wilson, often better known as Gotham Gal and the founder of the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival, is joining me as Board Co-chair. Joanne is a force to be reckoned with in championing women founders in tech.  Brad Feld joins our Board with great credentials as an early-stage investor, but more importantly he’s served for more than 10 years as Board Chair of the National Center for Women and Technology.  Media luminary and investor Cathie Black was most recently the President of Hearst Magazines having previously served as President and Publisher of USA Today.  Cathie has been the “first” woman many times and has broken her share of glass ceilings.  Rajiv Vinnakota is the Executive Vice President of the Youth & Engagement division at the Aspen Institute and prior to that was the co-founder and CEO of The SEED Foundation, a non-profit managing the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children which he started and successfully scaled up for more than 17 years.  Cathy Hawley, our long-time VP of People at Return Path, gets (though often deflects) the lion’s share of the credit for conceiving and championing the original return to work program at Return Path.  It is, truly, an embarrassment of riches. We are so thrilled to have them all on board Path Forward’s Board.
On the staff side I’m also pleased to announce that one of my long-time executive lieutenants at Return Path, Tami Forman, has accepted the role of Executive Director of Path Forward. I can’t think of anyone better for this role. Tami is the consummate storyteller, which every good founder and Startup CEO needs to be! More importantly she has been living and breathing work/life integration for eight years since the birth of her daughter (followed by a son). She is absolutely passionate about the idea that women can have jobs and families and live big lives. And, more importantly, she’s dedicated to the idea that taking a “break” (she and I agree it’s not a break!) to care for a loved one shouldn’t sideline anyone’s career dreams.
I can’t wait to see how far this idea can go. I truly believe this program can have a measurable, positive impact on thousands of companies across the country and the world.
Please join me and Tami and our talented Board on this journey. Help us change the world. There are three ways to participate:
- Click here if your company would like to learn more about having the Path Forward program in the future
- Click here if you would like to return to the workforce after a break and think a Path Forward fellowship might be a good, well, path forward for you
- And as a non-profit, we need financial help! Click here to contribute to our Crowdrise campaign, the goal of which is essentially a $500k “Series A” round (although it’s a non-profit, so this is a purchase of emotional equity, not actual equity) to move from product-market fit to a proven business model!
(Please note – we haven’t yet received word of our non-profit status yet from the IRS, though we expect it in the next couple of months. As such, any donation now is not tax deductible until after the certification comes through. While there’s some risk that we don’t gain non-profit status…we don’t think the risk is large.)
How to Quit Your Job
How to Quit Your Job
I sent an email out to ALL at Return Path a few years ago with that as the subject line. A couple people suggested it would make a good blog post in and of itself. So here’s the full text of it:
ALL –
This may be one of the weirdest emails you’ll see me (or any CEO write)…but it’s an important message that I want to make sure everyone hears consistently. If nothing else, the subject line will probably generate a high open rate. 🙂
First off, I hope no one here wants to leave Return Path. I am realistic enough to know that’s not possible, but as you know, employee engagement, retention, and growth & development are incredibly important to us.
But alas, there will be times when for whatever reason, some of you may decide it’s time to move on. I have always maintained that there’s more than a Right Way and a Wrong Way to leave a job. For me, there’s a Return Path Way.
I suppose the Right Way is the standard out there in the world of two weeks’ notice and an orderly documentation and transition of responsibilities. The Wrong Way is anything less.
So what’s the Return Path Way?
It starts with open dialog. If you are contemplating looking around for something else, you should let someone know at the thinking stage. Ideally that would be your manager, but if you’re not comfortable starting the conversation there, find someone else — your department head, someone in HR, me. Let someone who is in a position to do something about it know that you’re considering other options and why. The worst thing that will happen is that the company isn’t able to come up with a solution to whatever issues you have. I PROMISE you that no one here in any management position will ever think less of you or treat you differently or serve up any kind of retribution for this kind of conversation.
After the open dialog and any next steps that come out of it, if you are still convinced that leaving is the right thing for you, tell your manager and whoever you spoke to at the beginning of your search process, not at the end of it. That hopefully gives the company enough lead time to find a replacement and provide for enough overlap between you and the new hire so that you can train your replacement and hand things off.
Why do we feel so strongly about this?
We invest heavily in our people. I know we’re not perfect — no company is — but we do our best to take good care with everyone who works here. Hopefully you know that. And hiring great people is difficult, as you also know. Losing a well trained employee is VERY PAINFUL for the company. It slows our momentum and causes at least a minor level of chaos in the system. And as shareholders or future shareholders (even if you leave – you can exercise your vested stock options), I’d hope that’s something none of you want to do.
I realize the Return Path Way that I am outlining here is unconventional (and potentially uncomfortable). But Return Path is an unconventional place to work in a lot of ways.
As I said up front, I hope none of you wants to leave…but if you do, please take this request and advice to heart.
Thank you!
-Matt
Now…I sent this out when the company was a lot smaller, when losing a single employee was losing a real percentage of our workforce! But I stand by every word in the email, even at a larger size. This kind of dialog is, as I note in the email, both unconventional and uncomfortable. But just as one of my management mantras here is “no one should ever be surprised to be fired,” another is “we should never be surprised when someone resigns.” Ultimately, it’s up to each individual manager to set the right tone with his or her team, and also be in tune enough with each of his or her team members, to foster this.
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II
My post last week on How to Quit Your Job has generated about two dozen comments as well as a really lengthy thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. My various replies to comments are worth summarizing here – this is a reprint of my comment on Hacker News:
First, my post was not intended to be general advice to employees of all companies on how to handle a situation where they’re starting to look for jobs. Of course, many environments would not respond well to that approach. My point was just that that’s how we encourage employees to handle the situation at Return Path, and we have created a safe environment to do so. By the way, it doesn’t happen here 100% of the time either, by any stretch of the imagination. But I wish it did. When it happens, it’s better for everyone — the company as well as the employee, who either (a) ends up staying because we resolve some issue we weren’t aware of, or (b) has a less stressful and more graceful transition out.
Second, the way we run our business is around a bit of a social contract — that is to say, a two-way street. And just as we ask employees to start a dialog with us when they are thinking of leaving, we absolutely, 100% of the time, are open and transparent with employees when they are in danger of being fired (other than the occasional urgent “for cause” situation). We give people ample opportunity to correct performance and even fit issues. In terms of someone’s question below about lay-offs, we fortunately haven’t had to do those since 2001, but if I recall, even then, we were extremely transparent about our financial position and that we might need to cut jobs in 30 days.
But I wanted to take this post to emphasize a related, second point. If it’s a given that you are going to quit your job, then HOW you quit your job becomes super important. And this is general advice, not something specific to Return Path. Even if you’re unhappy – even if you feel totally wronged or burned in some way – there is never a good reason to burn bridges on the way out the door. In fact, the opposite is what I would consider best practice: make the transition as easy as possible for your company.
Document your job really well, including specifics of all open projects. Work with your manager and teammates to hand off all responsibilities. Be frank and constructive in your exit interview. Make the extra effort to leave things in good working order.
We have a long history of hiring back former employees here. We proudly call it The Boomerang Club, and there have been a dozen or so members over the years. We try to make it easy to come back if you leave. First, we celebrate the return of a former employee pretty widely, and we obviously modify our usual extensive interview process. If you come back in less than a year, we pretend that you never left in terms of giving you credit for continuous service. If your gap is more than a year, we don’t give you credit for the time you were gone, but we do give you full credit for the time you’d been here before you left.
But you can’t really be a member of The Boomerang Club if you leave your job in the wrong way. HOW you do that says a lot about you, and everyone at your company will take note and remember it.
The Best Laid Plans, Part IV
The Best Laid Plans, IV
I have had a bunch of good comments from readers about the three posts in this series about creating strategic plans (input phase, analysis phase, output phase). Many of them are leading me to write a fourth post in the series, one about how to make sure the result of the plan isn’t shelfware, but flawless execution.
There’s a bit of middleware that has to happen between the completion of the strategic plan and the work getting done, and that is an operating plan. In my observation over the years, this is where most companies explode. They have good ideas and capable workers, just no cohesive way to organize and contextualize the work. There are lots of different formats operating plans can take, and a variety of acronyms to go with the formats, that I’ve heard over the years. No one of these formats is “right,” but I’ll share the key process steps my own team and I went through just over the past few months to turn our strategic planning into action plans, synchronizing our activities across products and groups.
- Theme: we picked a theme for the year that generally held the bulk of the key work together – a bit of a rallying cry
- Initiatives: recognizing that lots of people do lots of routine work, we organized a series of a dozen “move the ball forward” projects into specific initiatives
- Communication: we unveiled the theme and the initiatives to ALL at our annual business meeting to get everyone’s head around the work to be done in the upcoming year
- Plans: each of the dozen initiative teams, and then also each team/department in the company (they’re different) worked together to produce a short (1-3 page) plan on a template we created, with a mission statement, a list of direct and indirect participants, important milestones and metrics
- Synchronization:Â the senior management team reviewed all the plans at the same time and had a meaningful discussion to synchronize the plans, making edits to both substance and timing
- Scorecard: we built our company scorecard for the year to reflect “green/yellow/red” grading on each initiative and visually display the most important 5-6 metrics across all initiatives
- Ongoing reporting:Â we will publish the scorecard and updated to each initiative plan quarterly to the whole company, when we update them for Board meetings
As I said, there’s no single recipe for success here, but this is a variant on what we’ve done consistently over the years at Return Path, and it seems to be working well for us. I think that’s the end of this series, and judging from the comments I’ve received on the blog and via email, I’m glad this was useful to so many people.
Book Short: The Challenger Sale
Book Short:Â The Challenger Sale
I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path. I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques. And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn. The great thing about this book is that it dives into the need for variation in sales communication strategies based on BUYER personae, such as The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer.
While both these principles are good – asking questions and tailoring communication styles based on the buyer – anyone who has ever tried to run a whole sales call by asking questions knows that it’s REALLY HARD and can sometimes just outright flop. There’s a new movement that I’ve been reading articles about for a few months now called The Challenger Sale, and I finally finished the book about it this past week.
If you run a company or a sales team that has any kind of complex sale or a hybrid software/service model, then you should read The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Whether you adopt the methodology or not, there are a few really great insights in the book that will help you recruit and manage a sales team. Some of the insights include:
- Understanding the five types of sales reps and why/when they’re successful/not successful. The labels are telling in and of themselves: the Lone Wolf, the Hard Worker, the Relationship Building, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Challenger
- Why sales reps can be trained as Challengers, and how important it is to rally an entire organization around this sales model, not just train sales reps on it (that’s probably a good reminder for any sales methodology)
- The ingredients of the Challenger sale – Commercial Teaching for Differentiation, Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control of the Conversation. I found the section on Commercial Teaching the most enlightening, particularly in our business, where we’re not selling an established category with established budget line items
The Challenger Sale feels like the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade, either directly as written or as it inspires ancillary works and related techniques. For that reason alone, it’s worth a read.